Cards I Love Part 2: 1980 Topps Rickey Henderson

What was the best 1985 Topps card in 1985?  I am not going to go check some old price guide, but I would guess that the answer is likely the Dwight Gooden card.  Nowadays there are three big rookie cards in that set, but none of those players were very important that summer.  Mark McGwire was in the Minors, Roger Clemens only made a handful of starts that summer, and Kirby Puckett was a fairly pedestrian outfielder for a bad Twins team.  

Meanwhile, Doc was on the way to a 20+ win season, and would strike out more than 250 batters for the second summer in a row.  All as a 20 year old.  He would end up with the 1985 National League Cy Young Award.   

We all know what his career became, but at the time he looked like the next great Hall of Fame pitcher.  People were crazy about that Gooden rookie card.  Rightfully so.  At some point that summer, from my two packs of cards per grocery store visit, I had landed a copy of the 1985 Topps Dwight Gooden.  

In 1985, I was eight, and really into stolen bases.  I had moved to St. Louis the summer before, and while Dwight Gooden was racking up some incredible strike out numbers, the Cardinals were in the middle of what would be a National League Championship season.  The team scored runs by getting players on base, and then turning them loose.  Vince Coleman stole more than 100 bases, Wille McGee was over 50, and Ozzie Smith, Tom Herr, and Andy Van Slyke were all over 30.  Fast players were really important in my world at the time.  

So, here is the shaky part of this story.  Some group of people were eating dinner at my parents house.  I am guessing that it might have been a group of my father's students, he worked as a graduate school professor, and often did that at the beginning of the semesters.  It could have also been a co-worker.  Anyway, they had kids, and the kids had baseball cards.  

Naturally being 1985, one of the other kids wanted to trade for my Dwight Gooden rookie card.  I was not really into Dwight Gooden, so I was happy to trade away the card.  My return is not in the same shape it was at the time I traded for it.  For years as a kid, this was my best card.  It has been handled a lot.  

The scan is a bit funky.  My regular scanner doing weird things this morning, so I am using the scanner app on my phone.  

This was the card I landed.  My older brother, who also collected cards, advised me not to make this trade, but Rickey was the king of fast players.  Sure, he was not a Cardinal, but he would have fit in pretty well on those WhiteyBall Era teams.  It seemed like a good trade to the eight year old version of me. 

Back of the card. 

Pretty sweet that this trade worked out so well for me, even if the card get a little bit of worn over the years.  This is still one of my favorite cards in my collection.  Yes, I have moved on and picked up a little nicer looking copy of this card.....

Already had this one scanned.  I put together a set of 1980 Topps cards a few years back, and that was my lone reason for upgrading my Henderson rookie.  I keep this card with the set, in a top loader.  Meanwhile, the other Rickey rookie is in with all my best cards.